When some object X is said to be embedded in another object Y, the embedding is given by some injective and structure-preserving map f : X → Y. The precise meaning of "structure-preserving" depends on the kind of mathematical structure of which X and Y are instances. In the terminology of category theory, a structure-preserving map is called a morphism.

The fact that a map f : X → Y is an embedding is often indicated by the use of a "hooked arrow", thus: On the other hand, this notation is sometimes reserved for inclusion maps.

Given X and Y, several different embeddings of X in Y may be possible. In many cases of interest there is a standard (or "canonical") embedding, like those of the natural numbers in the integers, the integers in the rational numbers, the rational numbers in the real numbers, and the real numbers in the complex numbers. In such cases it is common to identify the domainX with its imagef(X) contained in Y, so that then X ⊆ Y.

In differential topology: Let M and N be smooth manifolds and be a smooth map. Then f is called an immersion if its derivative is everywhere injective. An embedding, or a smooth embedding, is defined to be an injective immersion which is an embedding in the topological sense mentioned above (i.e. homeomorphism onto its image).[2]

In other words, an embedding is diffeomorphic to its image, and in particular the image of an embedding must be a submanifold. An immersion is a local embedding (i.e. for any point there is a neighborhood such that is an embedding.)

When the domain manifold is compact, the notion of a smooth embedding is equivalent to that of an injective immersion.

An important case is N=Rn. The interest here is in how large n must be, in terms of the dimension m of M. The Whitney embedding theorem[3] states that n = 2m is enough, and is the best possible linear bound. For example the real projective plane of dimension m requires n = 2m for an embedding. An immersion of this surface is, however, possible in R3, and one example is Boy's surface—which has self-intersections. The Roman surface fails to be an immersion as it contains cross-caps.

An embedding is proper if it behaves well w.r.t.boundaries: one requires the map to be such that

The kernel of σ is an ideal of E which cannot be the whole field E, because of the condition σ(1)=1. Furthermore, it is a well-known property of fields that their only ideals are the zero ideal and the whole field itself. Therefore, the kernel is 0, so any embedding of fields is a monomorphism. Hence, E is isomorphic to the subfield σ(E) of F. This justifies the name embedding for an arbitrary homomorphism of fields.

An important special case is that of normed spaces; in this case it is natural to consider linear embeddings.

One of the basic questions that can be asked about a finite-dimensional normed space is, what is the maximal dimension such that the Hilbert space can be linearly embedded into with constant distortion?

In category theory, there is no satisfactory and generally accepted definition of embeddings that is applicable in all categories. One would expect that all isomorphisms and all compositions of embeddings are embeddings, and that all embeddings are monomorphisms. Other typical requirements are: any extremal monomorphism is an embedding and embeddings are stable under pullbacks.

Ideally the class of all embedded subobjects of a given object, up to isomorphism, should also be small, and thus an ordered set. In this case, the category is said to be well powered with respect to the class of embeddings. This allows to define new local structures on the category (such as a closure operator).

In a concrete category, an embedding is a morphism ƒ: A → B which is an injective function from the underlying set of A to the underlying set of B and is also an initial morphism in the following sense: If g is a function from the underlying set of an object C to the underlying set of A, and if its composition with ƒ is a morphism ƒg: C → B, then g itself is a morphism.

A factorization system for a category also gives rise to a notion of embedding. If (E, M) is a factorization system, then the morphisms in M may be regarded as the embeddings, especially when the category is well powered with respect to M. Concrete theories often have a factorization system in which M consists of the embeddings in the previous sense. This is the case of the majority of the examples given in this article.

As usual in category theory, there is a dual concept, known as quotient. All the preceding properties can be dualized.